[In the following essay, Márquez debates the problems of classifying Rodriguez's memoirs as “ethnic-autobiographies.”]

A. ANALYSIS OF THEMES AND FORM

Hunger of Memory is comprised of a brief prologue, suggestively titled “Middle-Class Pastoral,” and six chapters: (1) “Aria,” (2) “The Achievement of Desire,” (3) “Credo,” (4) “Complexion,” (5) “Profession,” (6) “Mr. Secrets.” The book's subtitle explicitly announces its subject matter and the six chapters are variations on a theme. The six parts form the orchestration of Rodriguez's life; or as he describes the book, “Essays impersonating an autobiography; six chapters of sad, fuguelike repetition” (7). Rodriguez's autobiography (he mocks the term “ethnic autobiography”) is about his education: “I wrote this autobiography as the history of my schooling” (6)—but it is also about the discovery of a vocation and the search for an identity. Spanning from elementary public school in Sacramento, California, to Ph.D. studies in Renaissance literature at the British Museum, Rodriguez's life-story is a querulous assessment of his heritage. In recasting his life and his educational experiences, Rodriguez raises central issues in relation to Mexican and Mexican American cultural history. The most controversial aspect of Rodriguez's book turns on his assertion that his education led to his separation from family and Hispanic cultural roots and that it was a necessary and beneficial separation. He contends that the assimilation into Anglo American culture and the mainstream of the United States is necessary to attain a public identity and to achieve success within that society. Both praised and vilified, Hunger of Memory has become the eye of an ideological storm. An outspoken critic of bilingual education and affirmative action, Rodriguez has quarreled for more than a decade with what he calls the “ethnic left.” It is an issue that prompts a sardonic voice in Hunger of Memory: “I have become notorious among certain leaders of America's ethnic left. I am considered a dupe, an ass, the fool—Tom Brown, the brown Uncle Tom, interpreting the writing on the wall to a bunch of cigar smoking pharaohs” (4).

There is cause for Rodriguez's self-proclaimed notoriety. What is to be made of a Mexican American writer who says, “Thomas Jefferson is my cultural forefather, not Benito Juárez,” who unabashedly claims that “the drama of my life was not an ethnic drama. … The writers who teach me best about the drama of my own life are not American. They are British … I cannot imagine writing my own life without the example of [D. H.] Lawrence” (“An American Writer,” 5). Here is a man who makes no bones about what he values and what has given meaning to his life as a man and writer; and nowhere in this confessional celebration can be seen an acknowledgment of the traditional roots of Mexican American or Chicano culture—of its legends, heroes, artists, writers and those who serve as example or inspire us to rise above ourselves. No wonder that Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory incited an angry chorus of condemnation. It earned him derisive tags of vendido (sellout), agringado (a Chicano who aspires to Anglo middle-class values), and tío taco (Chicano Uncle Tom).

More expressive condemnation took the guise of academic criticism, as Chicano scholars and critics assailed Rodriguez's posturing in Hunger of Memory Tomás Rivera, a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature, led the attack with “Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis.” Rivera praises Rodriguez's prose style, but he rebukes Rodriguez's deliberate separation from the mainstays of family and culture. Explicit in the title, Rivera's central point is that Rodriguez in denying his heritage denies the very essence of human community and one's identity as a social being. More emphatically critical, Ramón Saldívar sees Rodriguez as a menace that threatens the social fabric and cultural integrity of Chicanos: “The individualized voice of the unique artistic sensibility represented among Chicanos by Richard Rodriguez is one example of the disruption of the organic Mexican American community” (136). Extending censure to Rodriguez's appreciative readers, Héctor Calderón decries “the moral outrage that the media and the political right have accorded Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory for shedding his Mexican working class identity for that of a middle-class ‘American’ male” (217). José David Saldívar joined the chorus with these trenchant remarks: “Rodriguez's autobiography is a highly marketable lyric of rhetorical angst. … Although Rodriguez continually tells us that he suffers from a sense of the subaltern's lack of advantage, from the evidence it is clear that he suffers more from a profound sense of snobbery and bad taste” (136–37). Widely anthologized in college readers, Hunger of Memory's currency added fuel to the charge that Rodriguez had provided a sop for “the most receptive audience imaginable: the right-wing establishment and the liberal academic intelligentsia” (R. Saldívar, 158).

Why did Rodriguez's book meet with a critical firestorm from Chicano scholars and critics, and at the same time earn recognition and praise from non-Chicano scholars and critics? Invariably, admirers of Hunger of Memory praised Rodriguez's expressive honesty, eloquent ruminations, and the literary bent of his autobiography. On the other hand, detractors either ignored the stylistic merits of the book or acknowledged them but were chafed by Rodriguez's refusal to celebrate ethnicity and cultural resistance. The question hinges on a more important concern created by the differences and problems in reading ethnic literature. For the sake of a general clarification, it can be argued that Chicano readers read Hunger of Memory differently than do non-Chicano readers. And it is reasonable to expect that these differences may extend to teachers who teach and students who read Hunger of Memory in the classroom. Moreover, the crucial matter is that the character of ethnic literature itself is changing and will continue to change. Hunger of Memory is an important work because it raises a problematical issue: What is ethnic literature?

Genaro Padilla, a discerning critic who has done the most extensive research and the best scholarship on Chicano/a autobiography, offers a judicious assessment and acute point on the directions that are being taken by writers like Richard Rodriguez: “Whether Rodriguez and his antecedents … should be disavowed is an issue different readers must decide for themselves. However, precisely because their lives refuse to conform to some of the images we have created for ourselves, especially in recent years when we have radicalized that self-image, their autobiographies do force us to recognize variations of the Chicano self” (303). The “variations of the Chicano self” in autobiographic writing exact the recognition that Chicano/a literature, like other ethnic literatures, is undergoing a complex process of evolution, change, expansion, and redefinition. Cultural anthropology submits the consensus that no culture is static; change is part of the dynamic of any culture, and it is certainly true of ethnic cultures and societies. The new forms of autobiographic writing assess, modify, qualify, transmute, and can also reject what has gone before—what is often called “traditional culture”—and seek new ways to express the sense of difference. In some cases, the certitudes of ethnic identity have given way to confusion or skepticism. “Ethnicity is only a public metaphor,” Rodriguez muses, “like sexuality or age, for a knowledge that bewilders us” (“An American Writer,” 8). Rodriguez's work, for better or for worse, is a harbinger of new directions in ethnic autobiography.

In several respects, Hunger of Memory deviates from the norms of ethnic autobiography and counters cultural-literary theories on the subject. In The Ethnic Eye: A Sourcebook for Ethnic American Autobiography, James Craig Holte posits a basic characteristic of ethnic autobiography: “One of the conventions of the conversion narrative is that the writer becomes a spokesman for the community. … The development of a self takes place in a community apart from middle class America, and the writer becomes, in the narrative, the voice of the community” (7). Hunger of Memory diverges from both prescriptions. Rodriguez calls his autobiography “a middle-class pastoral,” and he declines any representative role. Other Chicano autobiographies meet Holte's requisites. Barrio Boy, by Ernesto Galarza, is an excellent example and serves as a striking contrast. Especially in the light that Galarza's autobiography has been used as a cultural-literary measuring stick; some critics have compared Barrio Boy and Hunger of Memory, using the comparison to praise Barrio Boy as a true and valuable Chicano autobiography and to condemn Hunger of Memory as a false, pretentious, and ultimately self-serving autobiography. Clearly, Galarza assumes a representative voice and places himself in a collective historical experience: “What brought me and my family to the United States from Mexico also brought hundreds of thousands of others like us. In many ways, the experience of a multitude of boys like myself, migrating from countless villages like Jalcocotán and starting life anew in barrios like the one in Sacramento must have been similar” (1). In contrast, Rodriguez takes the tack of individuality and directs the reader not to presume an ethnic representation: “Mistaken, the gullible reader will—in sympathy or in anger—take it that I intend to model my life as the typical Hispanic-American life. But I write of one life only. My own” (7). Rodriguez's disavowal smacks of egotism, but we must not lose sight of what characterizes his narrative: it is the autobiography of a writer. The “ethnic drama” of Hunger of Memory is secondary to the act of writing and to the metaphors of self that have modified ethnic autobiography.

From another quarter, William Boelhower's “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States” contends that there are several constants in ethnic autobiography: “The infinite variations of ethnic autobiography are always on a single theme—a hyphenated self's attempt to make it in America. At the center of ethnic autobiography, of course, is the gnawing absent presence of an old world heritage” (133). This view presupposes a tension in ethnic autobiography between the necessity to assimilate and a cherished attachment to the old country. Barrio Boy, again, follows the conventional format; Galarza expresses the immigrant's hope of a new life and destiny in the United States, and he also looks back with nostalgia and holds fond memories of “the solid Mexican homeland, the good native earth” (196). Quite differently, Rodriguez sees “the old country” as remote from the immediate realities that shaped his life and he is embarrassed by his parents' sentimentality for “Mexican ways.” The counterpoise of Barrio Boy and Hunger of Memory sustains Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong's acute observation that students of ethnic literature have not adequately measured the differences between ethnic autobiography and immigrant autobiography. Wong's focus is on Asian American literature, but she briefly covers Hunger of Memory and advances it as an example of a pattern in ethnic autobiography: “As is made clear in a recent ethnic autobiography, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1982), loss of the mother tongue and acquisition of English may fundamentally alter second generations' alignments with both the ethnic culture and Anglo culture” (152). The prime value of “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach” is Wong's persuasive argument that the universality of an ethnic literature is not a given and that historical periods and generational differences must be included in valuations of ethnic autobiographies.

With the clarification that Barrio Boy is an immigrant autobiography and Hunger of Memory is an ethnic autobiography (however problematic), the counterpoint and the story of the Rodriguez family must be placed against the backdrop of Mexican-Chicano history (see “Teaching The Work,” below). In Days of Obligation, Rodriguez ironically recounts his parents' passage and how their homeland remained an enduring attachment: “My parents left Mexico in the twenties: she as a girl with a family; he as a young man, alone. … At some celebration—we went to so many when I was a boy—a man in the crowd filled his lungs with American air to crow over all, ¡VIVA MEXICO! Everyone cheered. My parents cheered. The band played louder. Why VIVA MEXICO? The country that had betrayed them? The country that had forced them to live elsewhere? … Mexico was memory—not mine” (53). Rodriguez's play with the ironies of history and his parents' contrastive roles reiterates a significant facet of Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez is a native son, and he marks the sociohistorical, generational, educational, and cultural changes in Mexican-Chicano history. He recounts in Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation how his parents made an uneasy truce and accommodation with their adopted country: his father admired the progress and opportunities offered by the United States but saw little else of value; his mother is often described as sentimentally singing Mexican songs and dreaming of returning to Mexico. In contrast, Rodriguez and many Chicanos of his generation—and more so of the present generation—feel no allegiance or nostalgia for Mexico. As Rodriguez often ruminates, mind and heart now reside north of the Rio Grande. He views with skepticism the myth of Aztlán, the retrieval of a heroic pre-Columbian past, and the celebration of an Indo-Hispano heritage. Hunger of Memory contains this dismissive aside: “Aztec ruins hold no special interest for me. I do not search Mexican graveyards for ties to unnameable ancestors” (5). Here, Rodriguez meets head-on the cultural nationalism that surfaced during the Chicano movement of the 1960s, which he derides as nostalgia wrapped in Zapata-Pancho Villa romanticism. Understandably, such spoutings raised the hackles of the so-called ethnic left, and Hunger of Memory compounds the problem when Rodriguez attacks Chicano academicians:

The students insisted they were still tied to the culture of the past. Nothing in their lives had changed with their matriculation. They would be able to “go home again.” … Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture. By contrast, the poor have neither the inclination nor the skills to imagine their lives so abstractly. They remain strangers to the way of life the academic constructs so well on paper. Ethnic studies departments were founded on romantic hopes.

(157–58)

In effect, Rodriguez's attitudes and the purpose of his autobiography diverge from the sociohistorical concerns that have formed the bedrock of Chicano/a literature and criticism. In “The Evolution of Chicano Literature,” a key work of Chicano literary history, Raymund A. Paredes encapsulated the most common definition, or description, of Chicano/a literature: “This leads us to the final question: what exactly is Chicano literature. … Chicano literature is that body of work produced by United States citizens and residents of Mexican descent for whom a sense of ethnicity is a critical part of their literary sensibilities and for whom portrayal of their ethnic experience is a major concern.” This predominant view underscores the ethnicity of Chicano/a literature, which transcends literary boundaries and where the import is placed on social, cultural, and political aspects of the experience. “In an age when the literature of the United States is marked by profound pessimism and a retreat from the national culture,” Paredes also argues, “Chicano writing is notable for its celebration of ethnic values and traditions” (72–74). The last point implies an ethical component to the oppositional or alternative values endemic to Chicano/a literature. Paredes's formulation of the nature and purpose of Chicano/a literature has its undeniable merits, but it also has limitations (acknowledged by Paredes) when it comes to works that do not fit the mold. How can it apply to or include a work such as Hunger of Memory? What if a work questions ethnicity or quarrels with its relevance? Is it less valuable because it does not affirm ethnicity? Does this mean that Hunger of Memory is not a work of Chicano literature and not an ethnic autobiography? Without a doubt, Hunger of Memory is a problematic work. Part of the significance of Rodriguez's embattled autobiography is that it raises engaging questions about the relation of culture to literature, and literature to culture. Foremost, we must consider that neither “culture” nor “literature” is homogeneous, unchanging, and static.

To this end, new perspectives are being shaped by scholars who have fused ethnography and literary studies, and these perspectives have marked a new direction in cultural criticism that may prove useful in approaching ethnic literature. Werner Sollors's schema in “Nine Suggestions for Historians of American Ethnic Literature” serves as a point of departure: “Ethnicity is not merely a matter of cultural (let alone biological) survival; ethnicity is constantly recreated as people (and ethnic authors among them, of course) set up new distinctions, make new boundaries, and form new groups” (95). Sollors has significantly contributed to the perspective that has taken the rubric of “the invention of ethnicity.” Part of the strategy of this line of inquiry is to place ethnic literature within the purview of postmodern cultural and literary theories. In The Invention of Ethnicity Sollors advances a fundamental premise: “By calling ethnicity—that is, belonging and being perceived by others as belonging to an ethnic group—an ‘invention,’ one signals an interpretation in a modern and postmodern context. There is a certain, previously unrecognized semantic legitimacy in insisting on this context” (xiii). Michael M. J. Fischer, an anthropologist who had done ground-breaking work in applying postmodern literary and cultural theories to the study of ethnic literature, amplified Sollors's premise to form an engaging thesis centered on autobiographic writing:

… so ethnic autobiography and autobiographical fiction can perhaps serve as key forms for explorations of pluralist, post-industrial, late twentieth-century society. … What the newer works bring home forcefully is, first, the paradoxical sense that ethnicity is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual and that it is often something quite puzzling to the individual, something over which he or she lacks control.

(195)

Fischer's conspectus covers signal works of Chicano/a literature and he concludes his overview of Hunger of Memory with a point that confirms the problematic nature of Rodriguez's autobiography: “The antagonism/anxiety directed towards Rodriguez's autobiographic argument, as well as the commentary on the political didacticism of earlier Chicano writing, pose the key issues for the creation of authentically inter-referential ethnic voices, as well as alerting us to the diversity within the Chicano (not to mention the larger Hispanic-American) community” (220). This and similar critical writings confirm that Hunger of Memory is a key text in postmodern autobiographic writing.

Considering Paredes's disquisition, for example, that Chicano writing offers an alternative to a mainstream literature marked by “a profound pessimism and retreat from the national culture,” what happens when Chicano/a literature moves into the mainstream or departs from its oppositional roles? Can a culture and its literature remain isolated, unaffected, and pure? Again, we are faced with a problematic situation that is a prime concern of Chicano cultural studies. Renato Rosaldo, an anthropologist who has also expanded his interests to literary and cultural criticism, makes an intrepid suggestion. His work on Chicano cultural poetics, specifically the aptly titled “Changing Chicano Narratives,” takes off from ethnographic studies on culture difference and historical change, and Rosaldo challenges “the received notion of culture as unchanging and homogeneous” (35). Surveying Chicano chronicles and historical narratives, he notes that the traditional role of the Chicano writer was to engage in cultural resistance, at the same time providing a social analysis and critique of the dominant society. This role has slackened, Rosaldo points out, as the culture and its literature have changed: “Once a figure of masculine heroics and resistance to white supremacy, the Chicano warrior hero now has faded away in a manner linked … to the demise of self-closed, patriarchal, ‘authentic’ Chicano culture” (148). Nothing that it is young Chicana writers who have most vigorously revised the canon, Rosaldo marks the significant shift in the literature as a result of these writers' challenge of “earlier versions of cultural authenticity that idealized patriarchal cultural regimes that appeared autonomous, homogeneous, and unchanging” (161). Beyond the scope of this essay, an interesting question arises when we consider that Chicana writers, lesbian and male homosexual writers (Richard Rodriguez, for example) are at the forefront of the new wave of Chicano/a literature. The matter, here, is the clarification that determinants such as historical change, generational shifts, social class, gender, and alternative lifestyles have impacted and will continue to affect Chicano/a literature in specific and ethnic literature in general. Subsequently, previously accepted views of culture and literature are being questioned and in some cases replaced by new dimensions in cultural studies. Rosaldo, for instance, concludes with the expectation that new Chicano narrative forms will create “a fresh vision of self and society” and they promise “an alternative cultural space, a heterogeneous world” (165).

Whether Hunger of Memory achieves a fresh vision of self and society is open to question. What is quite evident is a sense of self not grounded on a collective ethnic identity, but on a metaphor of self as writer and instrument of language. Like the general drift of postmodern literature and criticism, the most recent scholarship on ethnic literature stresses language, discourse, and intertextuality. For instance, Werner Sollors adds a postmodernist qualification to his exposition on “the invention of ethnicity”: “At this juncture the category of ‘invention’ has been stressed in order to emphasize not so much originality and innovation as the importance of language in the social construct of reality” (x). In Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez explicitly announces the subject matter of his autobiographic excavation and the primacy of the literary act: “This autobiography, moreover, is a book about language. … Language has been the great subject of my life. … Obsessed by the way it determined my public identity. The way it permits me to describe myself, writing” (7). Manifested throughout Hunger of Memory is the author's self-consciousness as a conduit of words and meditator of language. Paradoxically, this attitude accounts for the originality and uniqueness of Rodriguez's book and also for its oddness and spareness.

Peculiarly, much of Hunger of Memory is wrapped in indirection. The reader senses omissions or deliberate evasions, and we are faced with the curiosity that intimate, personal information is absent from Rodriguez's “autobiography.” Who were his friends in school? His best friend? Who was his first girlfriend, boyfriend, or first love? What was his first sexual experience? What were his favorite songs, movies, sports, and so on? These are mundane questions, but they are the stuff of adolescent life. Moreover, did he experience the confusion, joy, and the seemingly heart-wrenching fears and doubts that come with adolescence? Such questions of childhood and adolescence, common in autobiographies that cover formative years, are conspicuously absent from Hunger of Memory. It is an “autobiography” by self-definition and by tacit assumption, but there is little of what we have come to expect in autobiographies. Rodriguez hits the mark in one of his self-reflexive moments (he not only writes his autobiography, he also explains it to us): “Writing this manuscript. Essays impersonating an autobiography; six chapters of sad fuguelike repetition” (7). The vital clue is that Rodriguez is an essayist who masks polemics with the autobiographical act.

Rodriguez's passion is reserved for a lengthy exposition on the social and philosophical nuances of language. His polemical thrust is that language creates and defines a public self, and this process would separate him from his ethnic roots. He maintains that the apprehension of English and the culture it articulates diminished and eventually replaced the language and culture of his parents: “At last, seven years old, I came to believe what had been technically true since my birth: I was an American citizen. But the special feeling of closeness at home was diminished by then. Gone was the desperate, urgent, intense feeling of being home; rare was the experience of feeling myself individualized by family intimates. We remained a loving family, but one greatly changed” (23). The “ethnic drama” that surfaces in Hunger of Memory turns on the “losses” and “gains” that Rodriguez tallies in his middle-age years. Hunger of Memory is a work nerved by contradictions, paradoxes, and sustained irony; at the heart of its narrative strategy is the truism that something is lost every time something is gained. Ironically, Rodriguez's autobiography is a success story and a story of failure. Rodriguez measures the losses: the language of his parents—language of intimacy; the assurances of family identity; the shared knowledge of a heritage; and the pathos of not being able to go home again. It occasions one of the most poignant moments in Hunger of Memory: “If I rehearse here the changes in my private life after my Americanization, it is finally to emphasize the public gain. The loss implies the gain: The house I returned to each afternoon was quiet. Intimate sounds no longer rushed to the door to greet me” (27). He also acknowledges the gains and accepts, in balance, that they outweigh the losses: the language of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Lawrence; a public language and public identity that provided passages to all quarters of the world; and a sense of being “American” and part of the great experiment called the United States. The gains also provided, of course, the means and measures to write and publish Hunger of Memory—and for Rodriguez to become “an American writer.”

The saddest inflection comes in the conclusion of Hunger of Memory, where Rodriguez shifts from his attack on academia and affirmative-action programs to summarize his presentation of his parents: “But I do not give voice to my parents by writing about their lives” (186). Or anyone else for that matter, since the only voice is the autobiographical I: the discovery of self that caps his exploration of the past. The pathos that laces Hunger of Memory, from start to end, attends Rodriguez's controlling metaphor: “What preoccupies me is immediate: the separation I endure with my parents in loss. This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story. An American story” (5). Indeed, Rodriguez's autobiography is part of a national experience. But his credo must not be seen as a joyous celebration of birthright; Hunger of Memory makes it amply evident that it is a sensibility that garners the confusion, ambivalences, and paradoxes that accompany the problematic task of “making it in America.”

What is unequivocally clear is that Hunger of Memory documents an author's search for a literary voice to express and give shape to the experiences of his life. Ultimately, it is a quest for a metaphor of self. Rodriguez's metaphor of self is triparted: the impulse to write autobiography, the act of writing itself, and the self-image created through language and literature. The adage that narcissism is the pitfall of autobiography finds a variant in Rodriguez's extreme self-consciousness as a writer. From start to end, Rodriguez favors the romantic image of the lonely, isolated writer exalting his individual voice: “Each morning I make my way along a narrow precipice of written words. I hear an echoing voice—my own resembling another's. Silent! The reader's voice silently trails every word I put down. I reread my words, and again it is the reader's voice I hear in my mind, sounding my prose” (186). At the end, that is what lingers in the reader's comprehension of Hunger of Memory: Rodriguez's prose and a metaphor of self that subsumes ethnicity to the celebration of the autobiographical act.

B. TEACHING THE WORK

How long
how long
have we been searchers?
…
We searched through
our own voices
and through
our own minds
We sought with our words
…
We are searchers
and we will continue
to search
because our eyes
still have
the passion of prophecy.

Tomás Rivera's “The Searchers” touches on the essence of the Mexican American experience. The history of Americans of Mexican descent (Chicanos) has been a search and a struggle to find their rightful place in a nation that they did not adopt but rather adopted them. The struggle to retain their language and heritage is historic and heroic, especially in view of the fact that their culture has often been denied, devalued, and suppressed. Mexican Americans share a commonality with other ethnic groups in similarly facing the opposing or intolerant ideologies of the dominant culture. To some degree, there are parallels to the historical patterns of the European immigrant experience and Chicano/a literature also shares some similarities with African American and Native American literatures. Notwithstanding these similarities, the Mexican American experience and its literature have a distinct sociohistorical context. The social, historical, and political singularity of the Chicano experience is rooted in a tragic chapter of American history. Save Native Americans, no other ethnic group has a longer history or a closer attachment to the American West and Southwest. “As for Mexican-Americans,” Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong points out, “the history of annexation makes their situation unique” (143). Indeed, it is a unique history, and the historicity is caught in a common refrain among Chicanos: We did not come to the United States; the United States came to us. The phrase not only captures the consequences of Manifest Destiny and Anglo American expansion into the Hispanic Southwest, but also differentiates the Mexican American immigrant experience from European immigrant patterns. Some historians prefer the term migration, noting that historically the Río Grande (formerly the Río Bravo) is an artificial, political boundary created by the United States when it imposed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 on Mexico. The term Mexican American or Chicano, in effect, originates in 1848 with the annexation of Mexican territories; it was a historic juncture marked by the uprooting and disenfranchisement of the people who had lived and remained north of the Río Bravo.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed the people of these territories civil liberties, legal and property rights, and the freedom to practice their culture and language; however, as was the case with many treaties made with Native Americans, the terms were never honored and this failure fomented many years of injustice, discrimination, and segregation. The tragic consequence was that Mexican Americans became “foreigners in their own land.” One commentator on Chicano history has underscored the lasting significance of these events: “Since the current status and daily existence of most Chicanos can be linked to the failed promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it figures strongly in Chicano literature, both as a historical event and as a commentary on the Chicano's place in American society” (Shirley, “Chicano History,” 299).

The second most momentous event in Mexican-Chicano history was the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), a virtual diaspora that occurred as multitudes were uprooted during these turbulent years. It is part of a historic drama and this facet of the Mexican American experience could have been a chapter in, say, Oscar Handlin's celebrated work, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (1951). Instead, this story was to be told some twenty years later in books such as The Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans, where Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera capture the scope of this historic event: “The 1910 Revolution, a period of great violence and confusion in Mexican history, directly affected the Southwest. … No one knows precisely how many Mexicans were involved in this great exodus; one estimate holds that more than one million Mexicans crossed over into the United States between 1910 and 1920” (123). This historic migration would become a major theme of modern Chicano literature. For instance, José Antonio Villarreal's prototypical novel, Pocho (1959), is anchored on the “North from Mexico” migration theme: “the great exodus that came of the Mexican Revolution. By the hundreds they crossed the Rio Grande and then by the thousands. … The bewildered people came on—insensitive to the fact that even though they were not stopped, they were not really wanted. It was the ancient quest for El Dorado, and so they moved onward, west to New Mexico and Arizona and California, and as they moved, they planted their new seed” (1).

In actual history, Leopoldo and Victoria Moran Rodriguez were part of that exodus and Richard Rodriguez was one of the new seeds planted in a new land. He was born July 31, 1944, in San Francisco, California: a native son. Later the Rodriguez family moved to Sacramento and it became the setting for Rodriguez's recollections in Hunger of Memory. From his parents' starting point in Mexican villages to San Francisco-Sacramento is a long distance—in time, space, and generational change.

Out of the historical whirlwind of wars, revolutions, uprootings, migrations, and the constant struggle to survive in an often hostile society came pressing issues that beset Mexican American communities and which have become common themes in Chicano/a literature. From the start, Mexican Americans were caught in a conflict between their historical-cultural roots, which extend to pre-Columbian times, and their participation in “the melting pot” of the United States. And from the start they had to wrestle with the dilemmas of assimilation and acculturation. It is a historic and present quandary that extends to other ethnic groups: “The very language used to describe ethnic and immigrant experience underscores the notion of change and conversion. The image of the melting pot … is both complex and confusing” (Holte, 6). The persistence of these quandaries is evident in Hunger of Memory and other contemporary Chicano autobiographical works (for example, Arturo Islas's The Rain God [1984] and Migrant Souls [1990]). The most immediate question that arises is: Can a balance be found? What is the reach and weight of the hyphen that often separates “Mexican American”? Is Mexican American a single term, a compound term, or even antithetical? Can that space be filled with a sense of identity or can one be invented from the ethnic materials that remain or those that have been transformed out of necessity? These questions lie at the heart of la búsqueda de identidad (the search for identity), the overriding theme of Chicano/a literature. Taking a nominal example, Rodriguez's parents have traditional first names, Leopoldo and Victoria. When did Ricardo swirl into the melting pot? At what point—and why—did their son become Richard? It happened to Rodriguez and it happened to many Chicanos across the generations. Some took extreme measures in attempting to deny what they were and in attempting to be what they were not. Name changes (both first and last), denial of one's ethnicity, and various forms of evasion and denial are part of the legacy of racial and ethnic discrimination. These attempts to either deny or ignore cultural roots indicate a breach in the continuity of ethnicity, and they have social, cultural, and political ramifications. Literature has taken a major role in the exploration of the exigencies and pressing problems that confront the survival and continuity of Chicano culture and ethnicity.

Rodriguez's position in Hunger of Memory is clear-cut, and he takes to task those who “scorn the value and necessity of assimilation” (26). Staying with Rodriguez's terms, what is the value of assimilation? Why is it necessary? Rodriguez's tally of “losses” and “gains” does not satisfy, but it does not lessen the importance of the issue. Without a doubt, the process of acculturation entails losses and gains; it is a compromise between the past and the present, the traditional and the new, the familiar and the foreign. Each generation and every ethnic group has had to deal with the paradoxes of “the melting pot” and “the American dream.” The losses and gains have been dear; the measure can be found in the individual and collective ethnic experience. The most appropriate subtitle for Hunger of Memory is “the Americanization of Richard Rodriguez.” In one very significant way his autobiography is not unique; it is a brief chapter in the larger story that frames the ethnic drama of America. Thus, it is proper to place Hunger of Memory in a comparative context; placed not only next to other works of Chicano/a literature, but also compared and contrasted to other contemporary ethnic autobiographies: African American (for example, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings [1970]); Asian American (Maxine Hong Kingston's The Warrior Woman [1972], for instance); Native American (N. Scott Momaday's The Names [1976], for example). Cultural memory binds these diverse works in a common purpose. The retrieval of the past is a salient feature of ethnic literature and the foundation of all autobiographical writing. “History lies in persistence of memory,” wrote Eudora Welty, “in lost hidden places that want to be found and to be known for what they are.” There is, after all, a hunger of memory in all of us.

In specific and in relation to other works in this section, a series of questions can be considered as discussion topics or as theme topics.

1. A central concern of Chicano/a literature is the assimilationist theme and the tension between conflicting traditions and values. How does Hunger of Memory address this situation? Is Rodriguez's view singular or is it evident in other works of ethnic literature?

2. How convincing is Rodriguez's argument for the value and necessity of assimilation? Are there important factors that he overlooks or ethnic cultural values that he ignores?

3. The subtitle of Hunger of Memory is “the education of Richard Rodriguez.” To what degree is formal education an instrument of acculturation? What are Rodriguez's views on the educational process? Why does he criticize bilingual education and cultural pluralism?

4. Excepting Anglophonic immigrant groups, what is the special bearing of the American experience that requires a person to lose his or her native language and accept another language? Must one, as Rodriguez argues, replace that language with English in order to succeed in American society?

5. How do literary works differ in style and outlook among writers who retained their first language (for example, Anaya and Cisneros) and writers who lost their knowledge of Spanish (Rodriguez, for instance).

6. How does the Chicano urban experience (for example, San Francisco-Sacramento in Hunger of Memory Chicago in The House on Mango Street, and Los Angeles in The Moths and Other Stories) differ from the rural experience (New Mexico in Bless Me, Ultima, for example).

7. Richard Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory and Helena María Viramontes's protagonists in The Moths and Other Stories have “arguments with their fathers”; that is, they note a cultural transition and question the patriarchial authority of traditional Mexican culture. How do Rodriguez and Viramontes differ in presenting this concern? How are they similar? How do gender roles affect the nature or particulars of the two narratives?

8. Hunger of Memory, Bless Me, Ultima, The House on Mango Street, and The Moths and Other Stories are works of cultural memory. How is the recapturing of the past or the “invention of the past” a fundamental part of ethnic consciousness? Why is family history an important part of cultural identity? How do these works differ in their approaches to cultural memory and the valuation of the past?

C. Bibliographies

1. Related Works

Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Press, 1972. A powerful, disturbing autobiographical novel with a frank focus on cultural deracination.

Anaya, Rudolfo A. Bless Me Ultima. Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol, 1972. The most famous rite-of-passage novel in Chicano literature; a boy comes of age in a small New Mexico town and discovers the power and lasting beauty of his cultural heritage.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1983. A series of well-crafted stories or vignettes that dramatize a young Chicana's coming of age in a Latino community in Chicago.

Galarza, Ernesto. Barrio Boy. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971. A famous and popular Chicano autobiography which describes the author's journey after the Mexican Revolution to settlement and acculturation in California.

Islas, Arturo. The Rain God. Palo Alto, Calif.: Alexandrian Press, 1984. An autobiographical novel set in El Paso, Texas, in the 1950s; combines mythology and historical narrative to create a Chicano brand of magic realism.

Rivera, Tomás. … y no se lo tragó la tierra / … And The Earth Did Not Part. Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol, 1971. A classic work of contemporary Chicano literature and one of the most influential works of fiction; existential dimensions are given to migrant life in Texas, and the migrants' loss and suffering is given the dignity of tragic drama.

Villarreal, José Antonio. Pocho. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959. The prototype of the modern Chicano novel; mixing historical chronicle and autobiographical fiction, the first sustained exploration of assimilation and its impact on cultural heritage.

Viramontes, Helena María. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985. “The Moths,” Viramontes's best known work and an excellent example of feminist Chicana fiction, complements Hunger of Memory by examining and resisting traditional concepts of Chicano culture.

2. Best Criticism

Hogue, W. Lawrence. “An Unresolved Modern Experience: Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory.” The Americas Review 1 (Spring 1992): 52–64. Clear, informative outline and analysis of the content of Hunger of Memory; focuses on complex issues of cultural heritage and unresolved issues.

Márquez, Antonio C. “Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory and the Poetics of Experience.” Arizona Quarterly 2 (Summer 1984): 130–41. An essay in genre criticism focusing on Rodriguez's style and the relation of his autobiography to Chicano literature.

Rivera, Tomás. “Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis.” MELUS 4 (Winter 1984): 5–12. Arguably the best criticism on Hunger of Memory; criticizes Rodriguez's politics and ideas, but praises his style and literary gifts.

Saldívar, Ramón. “Ideologies of the Self: Chicano Autobiography.” Diacritics 3 (1985): 25–34. An exercise in academic criticism and literary theory that analyzes Hunger of Memory and compares it unfavorably with Barrio Boy.

Woods, Richard D. “Richard Rodriguez.” Dictionary of Literary Biography Chicano Series, 214–216. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. A library reference source and biographical essay providing general information on Rodriguez's background and career.

3. Other Sources

Boelhower, William. “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States.” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin 123–41. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Calderón, Héctor. “At the Crosswords of History, on the Borders of Change: Chicano Literary Studies Past, Present, and Future,” 211–235. In Left Politics and the Literary Profession, ed. Lennard J. Davis and M. Bella Mirabella. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Fischer, Michael M. J. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 194–233. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Holte, James Craig. The Ethnic I: A Sourcebook for Ethnic-American Autobiography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Meier, Matt S., and Feliciano Rivera. The Chicano: A History of Mexican Americans New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Padilla, Genaro. “The Recovery of Chicano Nineteenth-Century Autobiography.” American Quarterly 3 (September 1988): 286–306.

Paredes, Raymund A. “The Evolution of Chicano Literature.” In Three American Literatures, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., 33–79. New York: Modern Language Association, 1982.

Rivera, Tomás. “The Searchers.” In Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works, ed. Julián Olivares. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1991.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.

———. “An American Writer.” In The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors, 3–13. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

———. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, New York: Viking Press, 1992.

Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Shirley, Carl R. “Chicano History.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Series, 296–303.

Sollors, Werner. “Nine Suggestions for Historians of American Ethnic Literature.” MELUS 1 (1984): 95–96.

Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach,” 142–70. In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin.